1. How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected? 

I am exploring my essential question through a mix of online work (a coursera and an edX course) as well as through hands-on experience at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space museum in New York. I think that in many ways I am answering my essential question, but in some other ways I think my project is making me realize that I was a little too “zoomed in” with my questions. I think that generally speaking, I am learning a lot about aerospace engineering, but I’m also learning about military history. It is an amazing experience onboard and I think I greatly undervalued what being around that history 24/7 would do for me.

1. Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?

So far I think the hardest challenge I have faced is staying motivated to keep completing all of my required coursera and edX work. I am almost always guaranteed to have 18 hours on board Intrepid, as I work 6 hours a day, three days a week, however, that still leaves 12 hours a week that I have to work on edX and coursera. This is obviously not a ton of time, however, it’s not nothing and keeping myself engaged and ready for 4 hours a day can sometimes be tricky as I am working alone on my computer. Moving forward I think setting clear schedules and mixing up my work load (not too much of one class) will help break this up as well as maybe working in more, but smaller shifts. 

1. Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how?  What do you want to know more about?

So far, I think I have gotten a pretty good understanding of a lot of the different things that you have to think about when you are designing a plane and how each one is closely integrated with the other. One good example is weight. The lower you can keep the weight on your plane, the less lift you have to generate, and the less lift you have to generate means smaller wings, which means less drag and even less weight, and so it is easy to see how small changes can seriously snowball. However, they also have counters, for example, the Center of Gravity of the entire plane must be further forward than the center of lift for the plane to have longitudinal stability, and so that may mean adding more weight, which has the exact opposite effect. So I am having a very fun time studying this aspect of my project, but my internship on board intrepid has brought up so many new questions about military history, engineering, and so many others that I didn’t foresee when initially planning this project and I am sure even more will arise as I go on. Some examples are, How do you account for older equipment in a modernizing engineering project? What motivates people to join the Navy? From there how did they end up working on planes? Did they enjoy that? Wish they did something different? In some ways however, I think these can all be simply summarized by the question: What major lessons can I learn from Intrepid? Working on board has truly been a dream come true for me and I can’t wait for the next 4 weeks on board and the summer to come.